Spoof: Top 10 fears of today’s engineersBlog 7/29/2010 1 commentIt’s that time of the year again when engineers air their most secret fears in the darkest corners of the forest. This time, though, a journalist was lurking in the woods and heard the secret whispers of some engineers, including an unidentified freshly minted engineer and a mid-career engineer at an unknown company.

Welcome to the changing face of digital signal processingSignal Processing DesignLine Blog 7/29/2010 3 commentsThe world of DSP has undergone a massive shift, from the use of well-defined, math-oriented architectures to a more holistic approach that looks at the problem and selects any combination of available architectures, DSP, RISC or FPGA, to solve it. We've changed our approach too, to help you navigate these new waters more effectively.

The ripple effectBlog 7/29/2010 8 commentsPart of the reason so many semiconductor projects miss schedule is that staffing levels are not aligned with the level of complexity that the design team needs to undertake. This is solvable problem.

Musings about Tabula and other FPGA startupsBlog 7/28/2010 6 commentsIt has been a bad few weeks for FPGA startups. Tier Logic and Abound Logic (M2000) closed the doors, both apparently unable to get funding to continue. After some prodding from several high tech journalists, some bloggers, and a slew of calls from investor/wall street types, I started looking into the Tabula FPGA technology.

Protect your goal with post-silicon formal verificationBlog 7/20/2010 5 commentsSoC designers are learning the benefits of applying high-capacity formal verification techniques at every stage of the design. Our formal tools are powerful and versatile enough for a wide variety of tasks such as architectural exploration and RTL verification, all the way through post-silicon debug.

Finding the video signal gremlinEngineering Investigations 7/18/2010 2 commentsAn engineer battles time zones and a customer who isn't talking to investigate a problem with an application involving a high-speed D/A converter

Emerging trends in embedded systems and applicationsBlog 7/18/2010 4 commentsThe embedded systems industry was born with the invention of microcontrollers and since then it has evolved into various forms, from primarily being designed for machine control applications to various other new verticals with the convergence of communications.